Search

Artificial Intelligence (AI) must be directed at humane ends. The development of AI has produced great uncertainties of ensuring AI alignment with human values (AI value alignment) through AI operations from design to use. For the purposes of addressing this problem, we adopt the phenomenological theories of material values and technological mediation to be that beginning step. In this paper, we first discuss the AI value alignment from the relevant AI studies. Second, we briefly present what are material values and technological mediation and reflect on the AI value alignment through the lenses of these theories. We conclude that a set of finite human values can be defined and adapted to the stable life tasks that AI systems will be called upon to accomplish. The AI value alignment can also be fostered between designers and users through technological mediation. Upon that foundation, we propose a set of common principles to understand the AI value alignment through phenomenological theories. This paper contributes the unique knowledge of phenomenological theories to the discourse on AI alignment with human values.

There are many networks of sensors for earth system science. Most networks are local or regional in scale (eg mesonets). National weather services maintain networks for meeting stakeholder needs and responsibilities to the WMO Global Observing System. These systems are comprised of single task rigid sensors generally attached to logger systems. Sage [1] is a project which will deliver a cyberinfrastructure network allowing multi-tenant, multi-tasked sensor packages. In addition to traditional meteorological instrumentation and advanced static and pan-tilt-zoom cameras Sage nodes have powerful compute infrastructure allowing machine learning based phenomenology detection at the edge. This allows science question-based reconfiguration of sensor operation. A well described Application Programming Interface (API) will allow new algorithms to be pushed to the edge and new sensor packages to be added including those that have complex configuration spaces like LIDAR and Radar. This presentation will introduce Sage and present early example results such as using cameras for cloud classification, inundation caused by heavy rainfall and early wildfire ignition detection. [1] https://www.research.northwestern.edu/world-watchers/

For the vast majority in the Southern Cone countries, the coups of the past ten years have meant sudden and overwhelming changes. These changes affect every aspect of life—people's work, standards ...

The State of Florida (USA) is especially threatened by sea level rise due to extensive low elevation coastal habitats (approximately 8,000 km2 < 1 m above sea level) where the majority of the human population resides. We used the Sea Level Affecting Marshes Model (SLAMM) simulation to improve understanding of the magnitude and location of these changes for 58,000 ha of the Waccasassa Bay region of Florida’s central Gulf of Mexico coast. To assess how well SLAMM portrays changes in coastal wetland systems resulting from sea level rise, we conducted a hindcast in which we compared model results to 30 years of field plot data. Overall, the model showed the same pattern of coastal forest loss as observed. Prospective runs of SLAMM using 0.64 m, 1 m and 2 m sea level rise scenarios predict substantial changes over this century in the area covered by coastal wetland systems including net losses of coastal forests (69%, 83%, and 99%, respectively) and inland forests (33%, 50%, and 88%), but net gains of tidal flats (17%, 142%, and 3,837%). One implication of these findings at the site level is that undeveloped, unprotected lands inland from the coastal forest should be protected to accommodate upslope migration of this natural community in response to rising seas. At a broader scale, our results suggest that coastal wetland systems will be unevenly affected across the Gulf of Mexico as sea level rises. Species vulnerable to these anticipated changes will experience a net loss or even elimination.

The translator of Scheler's essay, "On the Rehabilitation of Virtue," presents an account of the context of this essay in Scheler's work and of its relevance to his concept of the ordo amoris and to his critique of Kant. The translator discusses the intended audience of the essay, its moral purpose, and the method of its procedure. The postscript further reflects on the essay's central themes of humility and reverence, suggesting avenues for a critical assessment of Scheler's conclusions. It ends with some reflections on the contemporary value of Scheler's contributions in this essay to a historical and philosophical understanding of the conflict between science and religion.

The effect of different drying conditions on the stability of NaNd(CO3)·6H2O and NaEu(CO3)·6H2O and the identity of the decomposition product have been investigated. The rate of decomposition and the nature of the altered phases are dependant on the drying conditions used. When the phases are oven dried at 120 °C, the decomposition is immediate and the phase completely alters to Nd2(CO3)3 or Eu2(CO3)3 respectively. Under less severe drying conditions, the Na rare earth carbonate phases alter to Nd2(CO3)3·8H2O and Eu2(CO3)3·8H2O over a period of 24–48 h, but they can be kept indefinitely in a water saturated environment. The implications for using Nd and Eu as actinide analogues are discussed.

Etude de la conception de l'ethique developpee par M. Scheler a partir d'un contenu materiel non-formel et dans le sens d'un personnalisme ethique, dans son ouvrage intitule «Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik» (1916). Soulevant la question d'une ethique fondee sur la vertu ou d'une ethique fondee sur la valeur, l'A. examine le fondement epistemique et le caractere noematique des structures de la perception et du jugement qui entrent dans la definition d'une science phenomenologique de la valeur chez Scheler

After a brief assessment of the programmatic application of phenomenology to value-theory (axiology) undertaken by Scheler in Formalism in Ethics, the salient characteristics of values themselves, their givenness, their nature and their functions are considered. We are subliminally aware of values in everyday mental acts of feeling and preference, and they precipitate in language as value-predicates, obligations, moral rules, and as norms of virtue. Their phenomenal content may be given specificity by eidetic experience. When considered as the objects of eidetic acts of feeling that is, ontologically, values are like Platonic forms (Hartmann), but they have no force over nature. They are realized either unintentionally by nature, or intentionally by human activity. They are a priori, that is, given before all human efforts to realize them. The emotional acts in which these eidetic experiences take place are stratified; some feelings are “deeper” than others are. Corresponding to these levels of the emotional life is the vertical step-like structure of the values themselves according to their relative worth. The contributions of D. von Hildebrand and E. Husserl to the phenomenology of value are discussed; specifically, the phenomenology of Husserl’s attempt at a formal language of morals is evaluated in its significance for material value-ethics. A central question of material value-ethics is whether this realm of values is a unified structure, or whether there are ineluctable antimonies among them.

Goods, moral norms, and the virtues become functional as the a priori foundation of the will and the judgments of individuals and cultures. They vary with the social conditions in which they appear. This doctrine of the functionality of values is not intended to justify social value-relativism, for the values themselves are objective and invariant in their content. An ethics of obligation is insufficient as a moral theory, (1) because it fails to account for the variety of moral norms, the variety of goods and concepts of virtue that are preferred in different historical contexts, and (2) because of the derivative nature of obligation. Further, it cannot account for the being of the individual and his unique calling and fate. Obligation is merely negative or prohibitory; nonetheless, it is an important category in ethics. It is derived from the experienced disparity between what is and what ought to be, when the ought-to-be is directed at the will of someone. The relationship of obligations to an authority commanding them is considered, and pedagogical issues are raised in this context. If an agent acts only at the command of an authority and lacks insight into the higher values aimed at by the obligation, he loses autonomy. The insights of Dietrich von Hildebrand are invoked to compensate for the apparent lack of the absoluteness of obligation in Scheler and Hartmann. Husserl’s reworking of a notion of a Categorical Imperative reasserts the value of absolute obligation for material value-ethics. Scheler’s notion of love of the good, specifically for the highest values that are realizable in one’s situation, as the only proper motivation of action, is contrasted with the Kantian notion of a rational will that acts out of respect for its indefeasible obligations.

Reference to a variety of scholars indicates a continuing perplexity concerning the meaning of Scheler’s concept of the person and its significance for material value-ethics. The acting person is said to be the fundamental category of ethics, to which the categories of virtues, norms, and Good Will are secondary. The highest moral value is that of the person; he is the bearer of moral value and of moral evaluation in terms of the objective Ordo amoris. The concept of the person – not the concrete individual person himself, which is impossible – must therefore be the object of phenomenological inquiry. This both Scheler and Hartmann undertake. The outcome of Scheler’s phenomenology is a description of the person as an unobjectifiable “trace of essence” that is phenomenally present in each of intentional acts. It is contrasted with the ego, which is the object of inner perception, and which corresponds on the psychic level to the lived body on the physical. The notion was severely criticized by Hartmann, who finds in it remnants of idealism and accuses it of unacceptable theological implications. Hartmann further insists that the objectifiable human subject must be the object of which moral categories are predicated; the subject endures throughout the life of the human organism. The chapter ends with an attempt to reconcile the two interpretations of the person, and concludes that Scheler’s concept of the ego could take over some of the functions that Hartmann finds absent in Scheler’s concept of the person. However, Scheler’s concept is far richer, has important historical resonance, and is amenable to a personalist ethics. The discussion brings us to the doorstep of ethical personalism in its normative implications.

The vertical table of values and disvalues according to their relative worth that was presented in Chap. 2 as part of Scheler’s phenomenology of cognitive acts of feeling and preference is now developed by Hartmann in several dimensions. He (1) distinguishes moral values and non-moral values; (2) studies how some of the latter’s contents causally condition the content of the former; (3) discovers kinds of modal, relational, and linear antinomies among values; (4) analyzes qualitative and quantitative oppositions among values; (5) extends Scheler’s scale of values in a horizontal direction, i.e., locates additional moral and non-moral values on each of Scheler’s five levels of values. A key to Hartmann’s strategy to fill out the “valuational spaces” in the table of values is his allowing the phenomenology of the moral sense to be guided at first by the ontological categories postulated by his metaphysics. On the side of the value-agent, dimensions of acting persons as bearers of moral obligation are revealed. The question of the individual and the collective agent is considered, specifically whether collective entities such as nations can carry moral predicates; this is a question that divided Scheler and Hartmann. The distinction between values and goods, and the non-moral values that condition the latter, is crucial for the transition to the phenomenology of moral action and moral obligation. Finally, the a priori relations that condition the material content of values are considered. Values are “intertwined” in a lawful way and the substance of these laws will eventually assist us in the examination of the question of the possible unity of the table of values.

The virtues are human excellences that express themselves in the capacity to act for the achievement of what the agent recognizes as the highest values possible in some situation. Such capability (Konnen) requires the re-integration of the person and the overcoming of conflicts between the “head” and the “heart,” or the “drives” and the “spirit,” and the possibility of such integration is limited. The virtues themselves are difficult to synthesize and integrate in a single person, for they each aim at values on different levels of relative worth and cannot be realized simultaneously. Even the most virtuous life, therefore, involves an inward tension in the face of irreconcilable oppositions. The capacity for the highest possible virtue is found in a rightly disposed personhood, including a tendency toward happiness. Similar observations concerning virtue are explored in von Hildebrand and Husserl. Virtue, for Husserl, must involve a struggle to achieve a lucid account of the values available in one’s situation and to will the right action insightfully. Binding together disparate elements in the human being, such as the desire for moral goodness, the intention to right action, and the capacity for right reason, is a requirement of virtue. Hartmann’s contribution to the foundations of virtue grows out of a phenomenology of the most general moral values, viz., goodness, nobility, richness of experience, and purity. An examination of this phenomenology prepares us for the phenomenology of the virtues themselves.

The key concepts that define material value-ethics – “material,” “value” and “ethics” as the term will be understood in this treatise – are identified. Material value-ethics is phenomenological in its reliance on the method of eidetic intuition developed by Husserl and others. Its “materials” are the value themselves, revealed in acts of eidetic feeling; its ethics is founded in the structured value-manifold revealed and corrected and corrected by the phenomenology of values. From this manifold of values may be derived the three “levels” of moral ratiocination: obligation, virtue, and personalism. Scheler’s and Hartmann’s independent research in ethics supplement each other in the establishment of a comprehensive material value-ethics, the recovery and criticism of which is the aim of the work. The significance of their parallel critiques of Kant’s ethics for material value-ethics is evaluated and a program for the recovery and application of material value-ethics is stated.

Scheler’s philosophical anthropology is introduced and applied to an exploration of how humans are oriented towards value and experience them on several levels, each of which is made a theme of analysis. The highest level, that is, the one in which values of all kinds are primordially and universally given to human emotions is love and hate. The next level is that of the fundamental moral tenor; then sympathy; then milieu and the moral milieu. These condition our receptivity to values, but they do not determine their content. The question then arises as to whether human being can escape this structural openness to value and achieve moral autonomy. Hartmann’s and Scheler’s contributions to the question of freedom and determinism are discussed and criticized, but no resolution of the problem is obtained here. The uncertain question of human autonomy and moral responsibility will be pursued throughout this work.

A phenomenology of human action examines how agents apply knowledge of values to the realization of goods. Scheler’s efforts guide us here. Scheler first criticizes Kant’s concept of action for its too-narrow focus upon the will and for a false intellectualism that is rooted in Enlightenment psychology. Action, for Scheler, begins with conation and its differentiations; it is fundamental to the formation of purposes and ultimately to the performance of an action. The person, his Ordo amoris, his basic moral tenor, his intentions, and his will all condition the moral value of an action that is “teleological” in nature, i.e., intends to realize values. Goodness consists in a person’s efforts to realize values. Scheler insists that what is willed is the action, not its eventual outcome. Its moral value is imminent to it, and is not derived from its outcome. We apply this phenomenology an imaginary case in which an agent attempts to realize values, and then return to the theme of moral freedom, specifically to the question of whether knowledge of the values realizable in some situation determines the will to act.

The present chapter faces three tasks that are central to Scheler’s phenomenology and also to the Christian world-view that informed his thought during his Catholic period. The first task is a discussion of his phenomenology of love and hate. The second is an exploration of the temporality of the human person from the point at which we left it in the previous chapter. The third is the completion of our analysis of Scheler’s material value-ethics as a personalist ethics by showing it to be founded upon the love of persons in and through the love of God as the chief motive to moral action. We begin these tasks in the mysterious and apparently ineffable waters where the last chapter ended. Scheler added to the tone of mystery by speaking of the “most hidden of phenomena,” the temporal quality inherent in the recondite structures of the person. Yet our discussion of the person threatens to run aground upon an even more mysterious and apparently ineffable shoal, that of love and hate. For while they are the most characteristic human phenomena—Scheler at one point declares that the human being should be called not homo sapiens or homo faber but ens amans—they are also among the most obscure. Love is said to be indescribable, and neither philosophers nor psychologists have heretofore given us much guidance in understanding it, though sociologists are prolific in their documentation of its role in the human economy. All of us experience difficulty when we are called upon to account for our loves and hates, and, when a psychoanalyst attempts to explain to us the pathways of unconscious desire that leads to the “cathexis” of one object over many others as our love-object, we are usually dissatisfied: “No, no,” we say, “that’s not it at all.”

In the previous chapter, I worried that both God and the person get lost in the struggle between Geist and Drang, spirit and life, that Scheler postulates as the mechanism of evolutionary change in both the microcosm and the macrocosm. As long as these two terms, “spirit” and “life,” are understood phenomenologically, as essences visible in the world—that is, as meaning-structures and, in some cases, as existential possibilities that can be self-given in phenomenological intuition—I have no problem with them. I would agree also that they are primordial phenomena in the sense of being entirely simple meaning-phenomena, hence without further foundation. They function in, and may be given through, everyday intentional acts upon the natural standpoint. Persons seek in their daily activities to realize both spiritual and vital values. One writes a letter to a friend, eats dinner, raises a family, enjoys a symphony—all these activities are phenomenally distinct enterprises that presuppose intentional acts, and whose essential structures involve, a priori, the essences of spirit and life. But when these two essences become forces operative in physical processes in nature, then the being they are operative in becomes lost, and yet it is he who is real, not they. Put another way, it is not “life” that is operative in me; rather I am alive. I “carry” the essence and value of life; they are visible “upon” me, but it is not life that makes me alive. The goal of phenomenology is to re-intuit the phenomenon of life, and to understand the meaning-structure the word designates. Metaphysicians, by contrast, want to know how the world must be in order that these essences appear upon phenomena at all; and thus they pass beyond the given.

In Chapter Two, we explored Scheler’s concept of the intentional act. His account of it is distinguished from Husserl’s account in its emphasis upon the structural or material features of intentional consciousness, and it is to a specification of such features—what Scheler calls the material a priori—to which we turn in this chapter. He distinguishes three kinds of intentional acts, each of which reveals a different kind of fact about the world: the act of perception upon the natural standpoint through which things are given; the act of observation upon the scientific standpoint, through which states of affairs are given, and the act of intuition, or what Scheler later called the Wesensschau,through which facts about the meaning-contents of perception are given. The phenomenological analysis of all such cognition and of what is given in it constitutes for Scheler the new starting-point of philosophy. Its terminus will be an extensive description of the phenomenological facts: the meaning-contents, or what he also calls the material essences, through which the natural and scientific world-views are constituted. Philosophy must then work out its puzzles by building ethical, metaphysical, and anthropological theories that conform to the phenomenologically reduced and re-experienced meaning-structures that make up the realm of essence.

By the middle phase of his productive life, from about 1912 until about 1921, Scheler had developed an essential phenomenology of religion that had clear theological implications. One observer, H. Hafkesbrink, argues that Scheler surreptitiously overstepped the limits of pure phenom­enology during these years, notably in Vom Ewigen im Menschen, by supply­ing philosophical arguments in support of Catholic theology in order to ingratiate himself with Catholics, to whose church he was a convert.14 I will discuss the textual basis for that claim in this chapter. After about 1921, however, he began to distance himself from the Catholic Church, and to extend the results of his earlier phenomenological studies into theology and metaphysics in a way clearly incompatible with pure phenomenology. The direction that Scheler’s philosophy was taking when his work was cut short by his premature death has been subject to a variety of contradictory interpre­tations. In these final years he speaks, often quite vaguely, of themes he wished to address in the books he intended to write. We have, in some cases, preparatory manuscripts, many of which have been published in the Ge­sammelte Werke thanks to the long and arduous work of Manfred Frings, who became their editor after the death of the philosopher’s widow, Frau Maria Scheler, in 1969. These planned works had as their central concern the devel­opment of a system of metaphysics and a philosophical anthropology. This transition from theology to metaphysics was not altogether seamless, for much in the later work contradicts, in spirit if not as frequently in the letter, the earlier phenomenology of religion. I will develop these criticisms in the next chapter, and show what I take to be the implications of Scheler’s turn to metaphysics. Here we will be concerned with the content of his phenomenol­ogy of the religious standpoint. However, the theological and metaphysical horizons of Scheler’s “essential phenomenology of religion” have been studied by some critics recently, and their interpretations of Scheler’s inten‑tions should be considered before we begin.

In the first chapter, the idea of the “given” as the starting-point of a systematic exploration of the relationship between mind and world was examined, and the notion of a variety of “standpoints” upon which to view the given was partly clarified. We noted the enormous complexity of the process of consciousness, and suggested that it is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to describe its phenomenal features and its contents in an unambiguous manner, as Husserl had hoped might be achieved. Phenomenology requires that we first work our way back to the ground of the possibility of any natural standpoint of any persons in a prelinguistic realm in which all human intercourse with a world begins. It is upon that standpoint where, for Husserl, the constitution of the intentional object is to be found, or, for Scheler, the phenomenologically “pure” facts are to be found. In our descriptions of the phenomena we find there, we must beware of reifying any of our descriptive concepts, or of attempting to explain the given in terms of what is not yet, or only inadequately, given. Philosophy cannot begin with metaphysics, that is, we must not attempt to resolve such issues as the nature of a conscious state and its relation to the mind; whether conscious states exist in some sense; whether all mental sates are conscious, and if not, in what sense they may be called “mental;” or whether the mind is a kind of substance that “contains” mind as matter may be thought to “support” properties. We must also not posit consciousness as opposed to the world, or suppose it to be, in a Cartesian manner, in some sense outside the world. Such issues as these make up what is called the philosophy of mind, which seeks to resolve semantical conundrums that are possible only based on a prior intentional encounter with the phenomenal facts of the case; and it is a reencounter with these facts that Scheler wishes to achieve. Our analysis must, as always, refer itself to the phenomenological givens. We must learn to see what is, rather than speculate upon what must be, or what the structures of our language may incline us to say about the given.

Throughout the twentieth century, despite the almost complete lack of agreement among philosophers concerning the foundational principles of their discipline, there has nonetheless been almost total agreement concerning one of those principles: that is the principle of the subjectivity and relativity of values. Only Christian philosophers have cared to weather the storm against the possibility of an absolutistic ethics, which is normally thought to be the only possible alternative to relativism; otherwise, assent to some form of relativism has united thinkers on both sides of the Channel and both sides of the Atlantic. What are the reasons for this near unanimity? To inquire fully into this question would take us far afield, but it is not difficult to see the grounds for it in the tendency of many philosophers to make of the human being an object of a value-free scientific scrutiny (the only kind of scrutiny that can aspire to the title of “scientific”). The goal of biology, when it turns to the human being, and of anthropology, or of psychology, or even of economics, is to understand and explain the values that human beings have believed in at various times and places in terms of the natural causes of their embrace. To make an object of a human person, it seems, is to deny any foundation for values, for they may then be construed as an item of human behavior, perhaps as tokens of the pleasures and pains that arise out of the stresses, frustrations, and successes of our animal life.

In the Introduction, I spoke of the philosophical impulse toward unity. To unify experience, we noted, is either to trace back all that is to its ultimate source, or to trace back all knowledge to an infallible certainty. For the Husserl of the Logische Untersuchungen, the quest for unity begins with the “things themselves” given to intentional consciousness. The primordial epistemological relationship is that of the given to the cognitive act in which it is given, and the phenomenological analysis of this relationship, Husserl believed, offers the final rock upon which philosophy must build its edifice. His initiative dismantles the wall that early modern philosophy had built between the subject and the object that had left the world divided between the mind, which “represents” objects to itself by means of images given through the senses and by concepts, and the physical world, which was thought to be known indirectly or “mediately.” The problem of establishing and clarifying the means by which an indirect access to the “external world” might be estab­lished had been left to transcendental, psychologistic, and empiricist theories. This mysterious rift in the world, Husserl, believed, arises out of a false start. We must begin not with speculations about the ultimate nature of things or of knowledge, but with a scrutiny of what is in fact given in cognitive acts. The totality of the world, Husserl believed, consists in what can be given to inten­tional consciousness upon the phenomenological standpoint.

We have now seen the shape of Scheler’s vision of the unity that Henry Adams searched for and found absent. His is a vision of a comprehensive realm of essence that structures humankind’s appre-hension of, but does not causally influence, the course of contingent events. Essences are: (1) The meanings denoted by symbols; (2) Self-given in phenomenological intuition, the Wesensschau; (3) Prior to all experience on the natural standpoint and perceived upon objects as their carriers; (4) Independent of human awareness of them: they are facts about the world; (5) Functionalized by human beings as the principles of selection among objects given in the perceptual field; (6) Capable of being arranged in orders of foundation, where the most primordial members are called Urphanomene; (7) Such that knowledge of them is apodictic: this knowledge is not susceptible to alteration, diminution, or correction, although the extent and order of a person’s knowledge of the realm of essence may expand, contract, or be perverted.

In an earlier chapter, we noted that Christian thinkers in particular have taken exception to the apparent absence in Scheler of an ethics based upon moral rules. Some of this dismay may be based upon a misreading of Scheler’s intentions and, perhaps, to an underestimation of the power of Scheler’s value-ethics to support an ethics of norms. Yet one must concede that his theory is closer to a Classical model of virtue-ethics than to a Judeo-Christian rule-based ethics. Scheler states the point succinctly: The doctrine of virtue is prior to the doctrine of norms.67 Must we choose between these two kinds of moral theory, and, if we must, what are the conditions of the validity of such a choice? It would be interesting to reread Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals with the contrast in mind between the Jewish insistence upon a moral system that set forth the principled adherence to injunctions of the Torah even at the expense of human excellence (e.g., the Pharisees), and the Greek and Roman admiration of great individuals even despite their breach of moral injunctions (e.g., Alcibiades). For the Roman, the excellent man was not one who obeyed moral rules, nor for the Jew was the righteous man thereby excellent in the Roman sense of virtue. To use a modern expression, the two moral theories are incommensurable: the gap between them is one of ultimate and criterion-less moral principle, and is hence far wider than Nietzsche’s picture draws it. To him, one moral theory inspired scorn among the noble Romans and the other inspired ressentiment among the “impotent” Jews. The Jews, at least, appear to Nietzsche to have understood Roman values quite well, though they rejected them as vain. In Scheler’s view, the two theories are commensurable, although they are by no means equivalent or isomorphic. They simply represent different functionalizations of the same moral universe available to all persons. Yet although his moral theory judges actions with reference to values and not primarily to rules, and although he does not insist upon uncompromising adherence to moral law, as does Kant, his axiology provides ample space for a concept of moral norms.

In this chapter, I will focus upon Scheler’s complex, diffuse, and, I think, ultimately misbegotten later work in metaphysics. Scheler’s thought underwent a seachange in these final six years,139 and seems to have lost its connection with the phenomenological method, which dominated his earlier work. These changes include, first, the abandonment of attempts to provide an Augustinian rather than a Thomistic foundation for Roman Catholic belief, and the turn toward the development of an original speculative metaphysics that would give us some form of access to absolute being. Second, the shift to metaphysics is coupled with his development of a form of vitalism applied to both humanity and the Ursein, which latter is characterized as a duality of interpenetrating and mutually founding primordial spirit and universal life. Third, Scheler abandons his concern for the phenomenological exhibition of essences unrelated to the metaphysics he was preparing, and proposes instead what he calls the ontology of essence. Here there is a shift from a concept of the spirit as the ontological ground140 of human consciousness and of the autonomous will of moral agents, to one that understands spirit as receptive and apparently impotent to alter the course of events in the world, but which, paradoxically, is given a creative and active role in the cosmos. Fourth, Scheler’s concept of personhood, so prominent in the phenomenology of Der Formalismus in der Ethik, gives way to the development of a philosophical anthropology independent of Heidegger, but one born of a struggle with, and meditation upon, Sein and Zeit. In this chapter, I develop and analyze these central themes in the late work. By reference to them, I seek to incorporate the detailed movements of his thought into a general picture of his late philosophical itinerary, and to diagnose its philosophical significance and validity. I will emphasize but not limit my presentation to the recently published manuscripts.

The preceding chapter demonstrated that Scheler’s moral philosophy is founded in a concept of the person, rather than in a system moral law, in a theory of obligation or rights, or even in a concept of virtue. Although it appears to be a virtue-based theory, defined as the capacity for action that realizes higher value-goods, or suppresses lower value-goods, we see instead that, for Scheler, virtue has a deeper foundation: both virtue and moral action presuppose the givenness of persons to each other and both are motivated by the love for the irreducible personhood of others, and for what is possible for a person to be and to do. Vice is precisely a turning away from the person as the highest value. It is an immersion in other values for their own sake: especially, of course, in the values given to our sensual feelings, but those of the spiritual and the holy can also impel persons to wickedness and idolatry, once they are severed from the value of the person. Hence all moral action, all human virtue, finds its final basis in the givenness to each other of other persons; without the non-mediate givenness of the personhood of others to an agent, moral action would lose its meaning and its function. We have not yet, however, spoken of the sources of our understanding of the personal existence of others. This understanding is founded in the primordial givenness of persons to each other, within their shared community, in intentional acts of sympathy. The phenomenology of the sphere of the other will occupy us in the current chapter.

I do not know if a history of the concept of essence has ever been written, or whether the interconnections of this concept with related terms in the history of Western philosophy—one thinks immediately of Plato’s Forms, the Latin word essentia, such terms as “quiddity” and of Scheler’s own term “Sosein”—have ever been adequately explored. Whatever its various meanings and uses, the term has displayed remarkable tenacity, and recurs even in everyday speech. In recent decades, the term has been the focus of attack by a variety of postmodernists and deconstructivists who take their cue from Friedrich Nietzsche, in whose work it is vilified as an idol of Western civilization that has contributed to its absolutism and intolerance.37 The concept of essence has, however, fallen into disuse today not only because of the fulminations of Nietzsche. The notion, common to Greek and medieval philosophy, that things are what they are by virtue of their participation in some essential nature, is foreign to modern science, which abjures such qualitative analysis. For moderns, to know the nature of things is not to know their essence at all, but rather the forces that determine the behavior of phenomena or changes in observable states of affairs, where “force” is understood as one of the four (or perhaps five) ultimate forces that are describable in quantitative form. We are reminded by such ruptures in what we call “science” just how difficult it may be to specify just what one is looking for when one wishes to “know” or “understand” something or other.

Although Max Scheler (1874–1928) and Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950) were contemporaries and wrote under the influence of the phenomenological movement, the large differences between their initiatives and achievements in philosophy resulted in scholars rarely reading them together. However, they shared one major concept in ethics, that of material value ethics. This ethics is (1) non-formal, and involves a profound criticism of Kantian ethical formalism, and (2) is founded in a phenomenology of the values themselves, that its, the content, available in intuition, of such values as trust, utility, friendship, or even the Aristotelian virtues. The present article seeks to uncover a latent harmony and consistency in the two men's material value ethics, and considers the possibility of its recovery for contemporary virtue ethics.

The cults, notwithstanding the weakness of their theories, have been making steady progress with legislative assemblies throughout the country, and undeniably have obtained from them favorable recognition by law. In some states they have won all that they have sought, including their own administrative boards, entirely independent of the higher general professional standards maintained by the state and of the administrative agencies for enforcing them. In other states they have won substantial recognition without separate boards. But it is undeniable that throughout the country as a whole they have made noteworthy progress during the past thirty years in establishing for themselves a very considerable legal status, and that they have seriously retarded and impaired the establishment and maintenance of the single standard of professional qualification for all physicians alike. Those of us who have been engaged from time to time in presenting arguments to legislative assemblies respecting the basis for